How to use zooming in Blender's viewport?
Zooming seems to work fine.



You can use mouse wheel as well as ctrl+middle mouse button and drag. It is often useful to frame selected while navigating as well Numpad . is the default shortcut for that.

As very few people experience problems with zooming I suspect that something may be set up wrong in your settings. You mention non standard hotkeys - there may be something wrong with the keymap you are using. If you are just starting to use Blender, I would strongly recommend to use the defaults for a while especially when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. Customization is useful and most of the time necessary, however you should give yourself a bit of time to get to know what you are changing.